Tech Lead — Robot Communication & Connectivity (human)

Neura Robotics · Metzingen, Riederich

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Your mission & challenges

Every byte of data that moves between a NEURA robot's servo drives and the fleet cloud passes through layers of communication infrastructure. As Staff Engineer for our Robot Communication & Connectivity cluster, you own the technical architecture of that entire vertical — from the real-time drive bus at the hardware boundary, through robot abstraction middleware and industrial fieldbus protocols, all the way up to fleet cloud connectivity and the Neuraverse developer SDK.

This is a pure individual contributor role. You carry no people management responsibility. Your authority is technical: you set architectural direction, hold permanent veto on design decisions within your scope, and are the person the team calls when a communication boundary decision is genuinely non-trivial.

You will provide technical leadership to approximately 20 engineers across platform guild and product-anchor roles. You write code, lead design reviews, author technical RFCs, and maintain current hands-on expertise across the communication stack. This is not an architecture-only position.

• Own the architectural direction for the full robot communication stack: real-time drive bus, robot middleware, gRPC control API design, industrial fieldbus protocols, fleet cloud connectivity, and the Neuraverse developer SDK

• Define and maintain the co-review protocol at the boundary between RT OS scheduling and the EtherCAT master — any board support package change must pass a joint latency budget review before merge; you own this process alongside the Robot Systems cluster lead

• Own gRPC control API governance: proto contract standards, versioning policy, backward compatibility, and streaming RPC patterns that all robot platform integration engineers implement against

• Set DDS and ROS2 middleware standards across all platforms: QoS policy, shared-memory transport, zero-copy configuration, and domain isolation

• Own the protocol stack architectural direction for industrial fieldbus integration: PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, OPC UA, and safety bus implementations; define the boundary between the protocol stack and the industrial interface server layers

• Drive quarterly cross-team state machine and API design reviews: any transition guard or gRPC API change that could be generalised must be design-reviewed before platform-specific implementation

• Lead quarterly cluster knowledge days: peer-to-peer problem exchange where every engineer brings one unsolved and one solved problem; output is a shared library ticket or design document, never slides

• Write design documents that reduce knowledge concentration; mentor Senior engineers toward Staff level; drive cluster hiring sourcing
  

What we can look forward to

• Real-time communication and networking

  • Hands-on EtherCAT master stack implementation and commissioning on production robot hardware — SOEM, EtherLab, or equivalent; configuration alone is not sufficient

  • IEEE 1588/PTP hardware clock synchronisation implementation experience on physical hardware

  • TSN stack configuration: 802.1Qbv/Qav/AS traffic shaping and deterministic Ethernet scheduling for real-time environments

  • Deep DDS middleware expertise (FastDDS or equivalent): QoS design, shared-memory transport, zero-copy, domain isolation at production deployment level

• Robot middleware and API design

  • gRPC/protobuf API governance experience at the cross-team level — you have designed APIs that multiple other teams depend on, including versioning and backward compatibility

  • ROS2 middleware stack proficiency: ros2_control, lifecycle nodes, diagnostics framework, launch architecture

  • Robot operational state machine design for safety-critical systems: boot, homing, fault, emergency stop, and recovery cycle patterns

  • C++17/20 at RT loop constraints: lock-free data structures, 1 kHz control loop discipline, latency profiling

• Staff-level leadership (mandatory)

  • Demonstrated cross-team architectural impact: your design decisions changed how multiple teams work, not just your own domain

  • RFC or design document leadership with cross-team reach: you have resolved interface conflicts between teams and had your proposal adopted as the standard

  • Mentoring track record: at least one engineer you have materially accelerated toward a senior or staff-equivalent level

  • 8+ years of hands-on engineering experience spanning embedded real-time systems and robot communication middleware

• Nice to have

  • Industrial fieldbus protocol stack implementation: PROFINET device stack, EtherNet/IP adapter, safety bus design (FSoE/PROFIsafe)

  • Fleet robotics platform engineering: OTA pipelines, VDA 5050 mission protocol, fleet telemetry at scale

  • Developer SDK design for external developers: typed node systems, skill marketplace toolchains, API versioning

  • Open-source contributions to robotics communication infrastructure (FastDDS, ros2_control, SOEM, or equivalent)

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